Data Compression

Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data takes much less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space than traditional backups.